With the chart having been topped by an expansion pack followed by the original game it needed to be played, it seems right to look at the underlying game. Add enough different things together and you can make a whole new genre. Command & Conquer was an extension of Westwood Studios’s Dune II, but it also plays like a recipe of elements from before that. Take a large dollop of Cannon Fodder’s shooting soldiers, add a sprinkling of Theme Park’s resource management and building, fold in X-Wing/TIE Fighter’s both-sides view and Desert Strike’s military camp, and mix well. The resultant bake is the foundation for a lot of Real Time Strategy games.
Westwood have a vision to bring it all together, and it’s a good deal cleverer than most of its antecedents. Command & Conquer is set in something approaching the real world and terrorists are attacking again, but they’re very non-specific ones taking on the UN’s ‘Global Defence Initiative’. This allows familiar settings while having just about everyone involved as American and avoiding anything like the offensiveness of the Strike series. And you can play as either side, with different units and tactics available to you for each. It’s basically Gold Team versus Red And Silver Team, and that works, allowing them to focus on the gameplay. Despite most of the FMV cutscenes featuring Westwood staff who aren’t actors, and treading the line of intentionally/unintentionally funny, they’re a hell of a lot slicker and better acted than those in Microcosm, too.
At a time when even more players would be familiar with Windows and mouse interfaces, Command & Conquer makes a lot of its straightforward mouse controls. If you want a bunch of your troops to go and attack someone, you drag a rectangle around them to highlight them (bringing up a little health bar above each of them too) and then click where you want them to go and leave them to it. That simplicity makes juggling controlling them with building up new bits to your base and forces straightforward, and lets Command & Conquer zoom out in all senses from the detail of battle to include wider strategy. Westwood do a good job of varying the missions too, with tricks like starting you off in media res as a base on your side is destroyed and leaving you to work your way back.
Working out the enemy’s strength and making sure you’re ready to match it before you go in, while responding to their own threats on your base, keeps momentum shifting in a way that makes its lengthy battles stay interesting. At least up until you’ve basically won but haven’t tracked down and destroyed the last enemy hiding in a corner of the map, a persistent annoyance at the end of missions.
As enjoyable as puzzling out its missions is, I do find myself thinking about its approach to war a lot too. Is strong resemblance to Cannon Fodder makes it natural to compare the two. In Cannon Fodder, each of your troops had names, you had to manage a few at a time, and felt every loss. They were replaced between levels from a line of recruits lining up. Soldiers in Command & Conquer die with similar painful screams, though they’re competing with a pop soundtrack and an informative female robovoice. “Base under attack” “Unit completed” “HWAAAARGH” “Unit lost”. The screams just feel like one more datapoint to manage. If you’re playing the terrorist side your people will mow down civilians without you even having to ask and it doesn’t mean much either — war crimes as narrative flavour.
When you replace your soldiers, you literally do it through a build function. Build a barracks and you can use the barracks to build minigunners and grenadiers and so on, so long as you have enough money to do so. Maybe they’re robots or grown in vats. This is a game of resources, not of people, and there’s not much reason not to send them all to die if it supports your cause, or to think twice about it afterwards. “Cannon fodder” has gone from bitter sarcasm to an accurate description. The abstractions that steer Command & Conquer away from straightforward offence and keep it so slick keep it away from any kind of humanity, too.
